Chapter 9: The Verdict — Theorem, Tools, Remainder¶

To define is to require identity and difference; intrinsic nature cancels identity and difference; hence a contradiction. With eight chapters behind it this sentence can stand at the head of a chapter and no longer be an announcement of what is to come; and for anyone who opens his mouth to assert, it has a twin: to assert is to require identity and difference; intrinsic nature cancels identity and difference; hence self-defeat. This chapter opens the court, in three movements. Movement one, acceptance of the theorem: the premise audit and the objections with their replies are spread out in open court, and the verdict is settled. Movement two, handover of the tools: the open cases entered in the register by the three preceding parts are disposed of one by one under the theorem. Movement three, inventory of the remainder: what is left once theorem and tools have been taken out of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, with this book's valuation of it.

Movement one: acceptance of the theorem. Acceptance begins from the premises. The premises this part's proof has drawn on fall into three classes, counted off one by one (for the full table, with sources and destinations, Appendix A is the ledger). Class one, four definitions: D1, the three senses of existence; D2, the three conditions of intrinsic nature; D3, the scope; and the boundary clause for the definitions. Definitions do not answer for truth or falsity but only for fidelity; fidelity was redeemed word for word in Chapter 2, all three criteria being taken from texts the opponents use themselves, so that the target is no straw man of this part's making. Class two, one body of logic: classical logic, together with the law of non-contradiction and the clause restricting Leibniz's Law; Chapter 3 checked the usage, and there is no departure from it anywhere. Class three, one analytic truth: P, that whatever exists has identity conditions which necessarily involve difference and relation; the argument in three steps, the granularity annotation, the grading of the word dependence, and the four ways of closing all stand in the file of Chapter 4. There is no fourth class. What deserves particular notice is what the list does not contain: not one item of scriptural authority. The original texts serve three offices in this part, and not one of them is the office of premise: they supply provenance for the definitions, historical actuality for the reductios, and evidence of sentence-form for the readings. Take away the whole of the Buddhist material and the theorem still stands; and that sentence is not a claim but something Chapter 8 demonstrated on the spot.

Objections and replies, filed in one table: the four failure modes of Chapter 7 make the main file, together with three challenges that come in from the side, each row recording the charge, where it was answered, and the finding.

The verdict. Exit one is reached: T-strong stands at analytic strength, the field of battle being the axis of dependence and the domain of conditions that both parties acknowledge. The gains are booked separately. Whoever reports a determinate nature collides with relative dependence at the level of type, and this is booked to the strong version; whoever retreats to the unsayable is taken over by the machine that works at the level of the act, and this is booked to the middle version; T-weak, as programme and as record of engagements, does not hang on the fate of either. Exits two and three were not triggered: no one has yet exhibited a non-contrastive individuation, and the very describing of one is already using contrast. Every channel of demotion is kept open, and this is the honest form of a statement of scope: the conditional demotion and the door of overturning the table were priced in Chapter 2, and whoever refuses which premise draws which grade of conclusion, all three exits having a product to show. The last sentence of the verdict is sealed in the key Chapter 7 set: the search for holes was made in earnest and none was found; what was found were three things clearer than a hole — the writing down of the domain of theses, the framework invariant, and that independence is itself a relative property.

Movement two: handover of the tools. The last chapter of Part 15 opened a list and stated that it was being left for the parts that follow to draw on; two items were assigned to Madhyamaka, intrinsic nature, and the criterion by which whatever cannot be dispensed with in a sentence is established as a real dharma. This movement takes delivery against that list, and then joins to it, for a single disposal, the open cases of the verdict chapters of Parts 16 and 17. The format is uniform throughout: first the D3 form, then which tool is applied, and last a record of what is preserved at the everyday level.

First, the dharma-substance really existing in the three times. D3 form: there is a dharma-substance; it does not break up under analysis; it exists always and is not turned by conditions. Chapters 3 and 7 of Part 15 recorded the whole of its difficulty: the distinction of the three times is loaded entirely onto function, function has no identity, and substance and function cannot be determined as one or as different. The theorem gathers that tangle into a single step: the distinction of the three times is a relative property, and one and different are established each by the other (the chapter on time), while the oath sworn by the dharma-substance is precisely non-dependence; and the identitylessness of function is not an oversight of the Sarvāstivāda but the formal appearance of the collision between the oath and the duty, falling exactly on the graduation marked by the scope-lock. On the side of preservation: the whole layer of three-times discourse is undamaged, and time goes on working as an E2 network of terms established each by the other. Part 15 said that what the end of the chain rests on is one word that has changed its name six times; this chapter adds the verdict: no name can be found for that post, because by the theorem there can be no incumbent in it at all.

Second, possession and unmanifest matter, together with the life faculty and homogeneous character. The reason for legislating this family was read out in Part 15 as a single criterion: what cannot be dispensed with in a sentence that must be allowed to stand is thereby established as really existent, at an exchange rate of one to one. The theorem's disposal is exactly the boundary marker of Chapter 7: from the level of conditions to the level of existence there is no such transition; indispensability proves the necessity of an entry at E2, and not the existence of a footing at E3. The regress of the possession of possession goes out with it: once a registered item need not be really existent, the motive for setting up a further registration for the registered item is cut off, the fuel of that regress having been the demand that every link be a real dharma. On the side of preservation: talk of attainment, of keeping the precepts, of belonging to a class goes on as before; and the words nominally posited on the verdict list of Part 17 acquire here a warrant in the form of a theorem.

Third, the atom. The specimen handed in by Chapter 6 of Part 15 is the cleanest of all: four rulings, every one of them a ruling, and each ruling added obliges another to fill the hole the last one left. D3 form: there is a minimal material dharma; it does not break up under analysis; it is not established in dependence on anything other than itself. Disposal: the entire identity of the atom is given by relative rulings (that atoms do not touch, that they are adjacent without interval, that eight substances arise together), so that its identity conditions are a net of pure correlation; the oath collides with the net, and this falls squarely at steps three and four of the core derivation. On the side of preservation: talk of the fine-grained is undamaged, and minimal units are legitimate items at the level of E2, which never swear the oath of non-dependence.

Fourth, the person. The Vātsīputrīyas held the self to be neither identical with the aggregates nor different from them, and, pressed further, inexpressible. Both routes have been ruled on. If inexpressibility is a refusal to state, then it withdraws from the domain of theses, and the machine that works at the level of the act is waiting. If inexpressibility is itself a ruling about the self, then neither identical nor different is still predication, π stands untouched, and the tetralemma is refused as before. The test against the instrument of Chapter 3 and the verdict on the chapter refuting the self in Chapter 6 of Part 17 converge here; what the line of non-self held on to was recorded in the last chapter of Part 15, and this chapter adds only the last step in the form of a theorem.

Fifth, nirvāṇa as an entity. The last line of Part 15 recorded the embarrassment of the three unconditioned: not falling within the three times, they leave the criterion of function with nothing to grip, and half the warrant for real existence is gone. Part 17 recorded the deadlock among the three schools and announced that this deadlock would wait until Madhyamaka took in hand the pair of categories, existence and non-existence, themselves. The chapter on nirvāṇa redeems the announcement: existent, non-existent, both existent and non-existent, neither existent nor non-existent — all four routes refused, the close being that this is not so; while the handling of the categories themselves is in MMK 15, from which the definitions of Chapter 1 of this part were taken. Nirvāṇa is not an object that is E3 plus D2; were it one, then in the direction of Preservation (b) it would be wholly inert and could enter into the causality of no practice whatever: "if there were no emptiness, what is unattained would not be attained."¹ On the side of preservation: the discourse of path and fruit is undamaged, and practice and liberation are alike among the things preserved, as Chapter 6 proved. The open case is at this point not answered but withdrawn: to ask whether nirvāṇa exists or does not exist is to have asked in the wrong sense of the word.

Sixth, closing the circle. The verdict of the last chapter of Part 16 says that commentary becomes a system by adjudication, because argument cannot do it. This chapter can complete the causal account: argument cannot do it, and that is not for want of ability in the masters but because the thing cannot be done in logic; what adjudication was protecting is a D3-type combination, and wherever it is attempted by argument the lever is present. The verdict chapters of the three parts thereby join into one line: the Vibhāṣā had to fit itself with a brake (Part 16), the Kośa replaced the brake with a steering wheel (Part 17), and this part writes down that the vehicle has nowhere to go — every route driven toward E3 plus D2 ends in contradiction, while the set of tools on board, classification, causes and conditions, the continuum, can go anywhere at the level of E2. That is the exact sense of the handover: not confiscation, but a change of plates.

Movement three: the inventory of the remainder. Take theorem and tools out of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, and what is left? The weight of the question lies here: if the answer is nothing, then the treatise is no more than a machine for reductios, and reading it is no different from reading a book of exercises. This book's answer has three layers, the valuation rising with each.

The first layer, the positive teaching. The verses of homage write the purpose of the whole treatise into their closing line: "who could teach this dependent origination, the good quelling of all conceptual proliferation."² Dependent origination is not an object that gets proved but an object that gets preserved: not one of the twenty-seven chapters attempts to prove dependent origination; what they prove is that outside dependent origination there is nowhere to stand. The first item of the remainder is therefore the whole positive teaching at the level of E2 — the order of the twelve links (the chapter on the twelve links is positive exposition throughout, without one word of refutation), the continuity of action and its fruit, the stages of path and fruit. What the theorem does for them is not to ground them but to withdraw the demand for a ground.

The second layer, the practical bearing. The chapter on the examination of dharmas gives the way in: "for the true character of dharmas, the workings of mind and the paths of speech are cut off"; Piṅgala's comment on the same chapter says that "since herein there is no dharma to be taken up or laid down, it is called the character of quiescence," and records of one who abides in the true character that he "is not proliferated upon by conceptual proliferation."³ The true character is not a deeper object; it is the name of a state in which proliferation has come to rest. In the theory of practice this means one thing: the completed form of the theorem is not a conclusion held but a state in which nothing needs to be held any longer; the proof is a road and not a place of residence.

The third layer, the keystone. Chapter 7 ruled that the theorem's silence in the dimension of situations belongs to its office, a meta-constraint being employed to issue rules and not employed to describe situations. The stone is now set at the top: the theorem's acknowledgment of that silence in itself is the semantic form of the emptiness of emptiness. Emptiness is not a piece of information about the world but a rule; the rule says everything there is to say within every framework and hands in a blank sheet at the level of situations, and the blank sheet is not a debt but the terms of the post. Two classical sentences here take their several places and do not trespass on each other. "The workings of mind and the paths of speech are cut off" speaks of the level of situations: there a meta-constraint has no right of speech at all, and speech being cut off there is cut off where it should be. "The ultimate meaning is in every case conveyed by speech, and speech is conventional"⁴ speaks of the meta-level: the rules are written with the public instruments of convention, and the ladder is set up on the floor below. One sentence departs from words and one depends on words; two dimensions lie between them, and there is not a single contradiction. The close uses the oldest comparison of all, the simile of the raft.⁵ To cross a river one needs a raft; having reached the shore one does not walk on carrying it. The theorem is a raft: the whole of its efficacy is in the crossing, every D3 refused and E2 kept safe; it is not itself a piece of furniture on the far shore. Whoever walks along with the raft on his head will find clause (c) of the hierarchy waiting on the bank. This book's valuation of the remainder is thereby written down: with theorem and tools taken away, what is left of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā is the thing it meant to give from beginning to end, a path that needs no metaphysics underneath it. This close agrees with where modern scholarship closes: the last chapter of Westerhoff likewise reads Nāgārjuna as a positive philosophical project and not as a bundle of reductios bound together.⁶

Passing the baton. In India this proof was read into two schools. One holds that reductio is the whole of its syntax and that no inference of one's own may be set up beyond negation; the other holds that emptiness must be established positively by an autonomous inference, negation first and position after. The dispute between them can be put in one sentence in this part's notation: whether the unified authorization ⊢¬π can be obtained by reductio only, or can also be positively established. China did not wait for that dispute to arrive; it opened a field of debate of its own on the two truths first — whether the two truths are principle or teaching, one or different, and how the storeys of the graded scheme are to be set up. The next part opens at these two places. This part closes its volume and hands in three lists: the list of premises in Appendix A, the list of tools in movement two, the list of the remainder in movement three.

[The Chinese text closes with a restatement of this chapter in plain language — the same content in a different register, the academic half governing wherever the two diverge. That restatement is not yet translated; nothing in the argument is missing from what stands above.]

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